The EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents today was very good. (The archived event is available.) James Hilton, University of Virginia’s CIO, did a great job of laying out the fundamental conflict between the academic endeavor and the United States’ obsession with ideas as property–an idea that has infused academia through technology transfer departments among many other avenues. Bruce Wieder, an intellectual property lawyer at Dow Lohnes PLLC, gave a solid primer on patent law. I wish we had had somebody like him available much earlier in the process, when none of us knew anything about patents.
I have some minor quibbles. For example, neither speaker seemed to know about the Digital Vending Services International patent. But my biggest concern is that the conversation didn’t go far enough. Having described the epic clash between freedom of ideas and ownership of ideas with great clarity, neither speaker made any real effort to explore how academia might move forward in grappling with this problem. Maybe that’s a lot to ask of one webinar. But EDUCAUSE has shown some admirable leadership in the edupatent area and I think they are in an ideal position foster this conversation. In order to do so, they’re going to have to move beyond Blackboard and really help universities to take a collective hard look in the mirror.
